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Richard Matticks
A man who was once described as a dominant figure among the city’s organized crime circles while he was a leader in the West End Gang has died of natural causes. Richard Matticks, 80, died Wednesday after arriving at a Montreal-area hospital just days before. Matticks was known to have suffered from cancer, but sources who spoke to the Montreal Gazette differed on what illness prompted him to seek medical treatment. Matticks was the older brother of Gerald “Gerry” Matticks, 74, and both men had, for years, been alleged to have acted as leaders of the West End Gang, a group of criminals who shared an Irish heritage and grew up in Griffintown and Pointe-St-Charles. While most alleged members of the group deny publicly that they are part of an organization along the lines of the Hells Angels or the Mafia, some do acknowledge, in private, they are a collection of men who came to rely on each other. According to the book Montreal’s Irish Mafia, by Montreal author D’Arcy O’Connor, Richard and Gerry Matticks were part of a family that included twelve other siblings and were raised in Goose Village — a predominantly Irish neighbourhood at the time — adjacent to Griffintown. “Like some other large Irish Catholic families from Griffintown, Goose Village and the Pointe, most of the Matticks brothers turned to crime in the latter half of the 20th century as a quick and easy way to escape their impoverished conditions. For Richard, it was initially truck hijackings, and later the importation and wholesale distribution of drugs,” O’Connor wrote in an email interview on Tuesday. By the late 1950s, Richard Matticks had already served a significant prison term, for breaking and entering and, during the 1960s and 1970s, he and some of his brothers came to notoriety for hijacking trucks. Their reputation convinced the Commission d’enquête sur le crime organisé (CECO), a provincial inquiry into organized crime held during the 1970s, to hold a separate set of hearings to concentrate on the Matticks Clan specifically. But the CECO hearings had little impact on the brothers. They appeared to gradually gain influence within the West End Gang after its leader, Frank “Dunie” Ryan, was murdered in 1984 and the man who took his place, Allan “Weasel” Ross was convicted in the U.S., in 1992, of conspiring to import and traffic in at least 10 tonnes of cocaine and more than 300 tonnes of marijuana. Ross is serving his life sentence in a federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania. In May 1994, the Sûreté du Québec arrested both brothers, along with 10 other people, as part of an investigation that revealed they had considerable influence within the Port of Montreal. The investigation, dubbed Project Thor, began after three shipping containers were tagged as suspicious as they headed to the port. It led to the seizure of more than 26 tonnes of hashish packed inside containers that were supposed to hold blouses and spices. At the time, the SQ called it one of the largest drug smuggling operations to be uncovered in North America. Details that later emerged, as part of a public inquiry, indicated some of the people arrested would stop at nothing to take control of the case while it was before the courts. A prosecutor alleged she was offered bribes and her life was threatened if she opposed the release of the Matticks brothers while they were charged. The investigation also linked Richard Matticks to an apartment on Hutchison St. in Montreal that turned out be empty except for a telephone. The man who rented the apartment to Matticks had no problem identifying photos of him, but later claimed to have lied about everything after the brothers were arrested. The case fell apart on June 15, 1995, when a Quebec Court judge ordered a stay of proceedings after determining that SQ investigators had planted evidence by producing four maritime lading documents as original evidence when it was clear they were copies that were faxed from one government organization to another. At the time, the prosecution characterized what happened as an error made in good faith. But the stunning court decision, which came to be widely known as the Matticks Affair in Quebec, led to the Poitras Commission, a public inquiry that expanded significantly and revealed the SQ routinely broke the law during investigations and lacked professionalism. The $20-million inquiry led to large-scale reforms of the provincial police force. Despite the lucky break they were dealt, the Matticks brothers resumed their drug smuggling activities and were arrested again in different large-scale organized crime investigations. In May 1997, Richard Matticks was arrested by the SQ as part of an investigation into the Rock Machine, a criminal organization that was, at the time, engaged in a bloody war with the Hells Angels. Matticks wasn’t charged with members of the Rock Machine, but his case involved the seizure of eight kilograms of cocaine. A month after his arrest, Matticks pleaded guilty to possession of cocaine with the intent to traffic and was sentenced to a three-year prison term and fined $50,000. The National Parole Board later turned him down for a release after Matticks was characterized as “a dominant figure” among Montreal’s criminal organizations during a parole hearing. In 2001, Gerry Matticks was arrested in Operation Printemps 2001, a lengthy investigation into the Hells Angels. It was later revealed in court that despite the attention from Project Thor, Gerry Matticks still held considerable sway at the Port of Montreal and used his influence to get containers out without being inspected. The Hells Angels reached an agreement with Matticks to get massive amounts of cocaine and hashish through the port. In the years that followed his 1997 arrest, Richard Matticks managed to keep a low profile even though a few police sources described him as someone who was still considered a leader among the West End Gang. In 2006, his frequent presence at a bar in Pointe-St-Charles was one of many reasons behind a decision by the Régie des alcools, des courses et des jeux to revoke its liquor permit. Lawrence Cooney, 45, a man serving a three-year prison term for beating a man with a meat tenderizer to collect on a gambling debt, was known to act as a bodyguard outside the bar before it was shut down. In 2008, a Quebec Court decision made reference to how the SQ also investigated Richard Matticks as part of a probe dubbed Project Relève. The investigation initially centred on Matticks and a well known drug dealer based in the Eastern Townships. According to the decision, the focus of the investigation later shifted to a methamphetamine lab in the Townships and produced a few arrests, but Matticks was never charged in Project Relève. Category:Canadian mobsters